during the last weeks, and how Fredriksson had almost destroyed her.
"Jesus Christ," Cortez said.
"I know that this is your story, Henry. But equally I have no choice. Can you agree to this?"
Cortez was silent for a long while.
"Thanks for asking." he said. "It's O.K. to run the story with my byline. If it's O.K. with Malin, I should say."
"It's O.K. with me," Eriksson said.
"Thank you both," Berger said. "Can you tell Mikael? I don't suppose he's in yet."
"I'll talk to Mikael," Eriksson said. "But Erika, does this mean that you're out of work from today?"
Berger laughed. "I've decided to take the rest of the year off. Believe me, a few weeks at S.M.P. was enough."
"I don't think you ought to start thinking in terms of a holiday yet," Eriksson said.
"Why not?"
"Could you come here this afternoon?"
"What for?"
"I need help. If you want to come back to being editor-in-chief here, you could start tomorrow morning."
"Malin, you're the editor-in-chief. Anything else is out of the question."
"Then you could start as assistant editor," Eriksson laughed.
"Are you serious?"
"Oh, Erika, I miss you so much that I'm ready to die. One reason I took the job here was so that I'd have a chance to work with you. And now you're somewhere else."
Berger said nothing for a minute. She had not even thought about the possibility of making a comeback at Millennium.
"Do you think I'd really be welcome?" she said hesitantly.
"What do you think? I reckon we'd begin with a huge celebration which I would arrange myself. And you'd be back just in time for us to publish you-know-what."
Berger checked the clock on her desk. 10.55. In a couple of hours her whole world had been turned upside down. She realized what a longing she had to walk up the stairs at Millennium again.
"I have a few things to take care of here over the next few hours. Is it O.K. if I pop in at around 4.00?"
Linder looked Armansky directly in the eye as she told him exactly what had happened during the night. The only thing she left out was her sudden intuition that the hacking of Fredriksson's computer had something to do with Salander. She kept that to herself for two reasons. First, she thought it sounded too implausible. Second, she knew that Armansky was somehow up to his neck in the Salander affair along with Blomkvist.
Armansky listened intently. When Linder finished her account, he said: "Beckman called about an hour ago."
"Oh?"
"He and Berger are coming in later this week to sign a contract. He wants to thank us for what Milton has done and above all for what you have done."
"I see. It's nice to have a satisfied client."
"He also wants to order a safe for the house. We'll install it and finish up the alarm package before this weekend."
"That's good."
"He says he wants us to invoice him for your work over the weekend. That'll make it quite a sizable bill we'll be sending them." Armansky sighed. "Susanne, you do know that Fredriksson could go to the police and get you into very deep water on a number of counts."
She nodded.
"Mind you, he'd end up in prison so fast it would make his head spin, but he might think it was worth it."
"I doubt he has the balls to go to the police."
"You may be right, but what you did far exceeded instructions."
"I know."
"So how do you think I should react?"
"Only you can decide that."
"How did you think I would to react?"
"What I think has nothing to do with it. You could always sack me."
"Hardly. I can't afford to lose a professional of your calibre."
"Thanks."
"But if you do anything like this again, I'm going to get very angry."
Linder nodded.
"What did you do with the hard drive?"
"It's destroyed. I put it in a vice this morning and crushed it."
"Then we can forget about all this."
Berger spent the rest of the morning calling the board members of S.M.P. She reached the deputy chairman at his summer house near Vaxholm and persuaded him to drive to the city as quickly as he could. A rather makeshift board assembled over lunch. Berger began by explaining how the Cortez folder had come to her, and what consequences it had already had.
When she finished it was proposed, as she had anticipated, that they try to find another solution. Berger told them that S.M.P. was going to run the story the next day. She also told them that this would be her last day of work and that